The Innocents

by Nette Hilton

  Zilla Trumble could have chosen anyone.

  ‘Funny name,’ she’d said as soon as she’d organised herself at her desk. ‘D’they call yer anything else? Or just Missie?’

  It fair took the wind out of her sails, as Dotty Evans would say. ‘Just Missie.’

  ‘I get called Zilla.’ She took the book that Miss Martin put on her table. ‘I never knew anyone called Missie before. Funny, eh?’

  For a few seconds the amazing new girl was busy finding the right page but, once found, she immediately lost interest.

  ‘Where d’you live then?’ she’d asked next. ‘I’m living out near the mill. Mum’s new bloke’s working out there. Where’s your dad work?’

  ‘He never came back after the war.’ The words were shocked out of her mouth before she could even think about them.

  ‘Bad luck,’ Zilla said while she peered forward to check the ink in the inkwell. She rubbed her fingers around the top and examined their black tips and then tasted them. ‘Wish my new dad’d drop dead. Me mum’d be a whole lot better off.’

  Missie knew her eyes were wide and she thought straight away that this wasn’t the sort of girl that mothers liked. This was the sort of girl that mothers warned about and said should change their ways if they didn’t want to finish up in a whole mess of trouble. What that trouble was exactly was a bit of a mystery, but she suspected it had something to do with men and hanging around outside the pub and being called common.

  Dotty Evans said the Baxter girls were common, as common as cat shit was the way she put it, because they hung around the Commercial and took on all comers. Missie never found out what all comers were because her mother sent her, lickety-split, up the stairs as soon as Dotty Evans said it. The Baxter girls were pretty grubby-looking, though. And they had hanging-down petticoats and shoes with bent-over heels.

  Zilla looked perfect but there was a tempting wickedness about her just the same. She was the sort of girl that you could tell, out loud, all the things that you longed to test out but weren’t quite game.

  ‘I know someone who died,’ Missie said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Zilla stopped rubbing at the ink blots at the end of her fingers. ‘Who’s that then? A grandpa or somethin’?’

  Missie shook her head. Now that she’d said it she couldn’t quite bring herself to say Judith’s name out loud. Not just to claim a new friend. An old person, a really old person would have been all right. But Judith Mae was just little.

  Zilla’s eyes opened wide. Eyebrows up. Her mouth, a lovely mouth, all red and plump, formed a delightful little ‘O’ and she leaned closer. Her long curling pigtails were trapped beneath her chest as she leaned forward and she straightened to flip them back across her shoulder. A breath of sour pillows drifted across Missie and she saw, although she was sorry she’d noticed, a bird’s nest of unbrushed hair tight up beneath the pigtail’s hair bands.

  ‘It’s that little kid, isn’t it? That girl ... what’s her name?’

  ‘Judith Mae,’ Missie said quietly.

  ‘You never.’ Zilla leaned over and placed one arm snugly around Missie’s shoulders. ‘The old girl down the road told us all about it. One of the posh kids, wasn’t it? She reckons it’s why you don’t live in them upstairs-downstairs houses.’ She gave a motherly pat with her inky wet fingers. ‘You poor little thing.’

  Zilla smelt a bit. A tight, choky smell that drifted up from her jumper. Missie angled her head enough so her hair wasn’t too close to the blonde bird’s nest Her mother’d have a fit if she went home with nits.

  ‘My little cousin died,’ Zilla was saying. ‘Got real crook and just died. Me poor mum nearly had a conniption. Me auntie dressed him in the jumper Mum had given him and he got buried in it. Bit of a waste if you ask me...’

  ‘Sit up straight, Priscilla.’ Miss Martin was waiting. ‘Lips sealed now.’

  Zilla sat up straight but not before she angled her head so Missie could see her grin. And read her lips.

  ‘Playtime,’ she mouthed. ‘Out there.’ And she pointed to the end of the building, the same end where kids who had friends hung out together to gossip and pull sweet grasses from their stems and dangle them from their lips while they talked.

  Missie knew that if Judith wasn’t dead she mightn’t have got Zilla Trumble.

  It was lucky that it was swap card time and that meant there were other things to do besides talk about Judith Mae. Missie suspected her cards weren’t up to much but they were a whole lot better than Zilla’s.

  ‘We could really use some fresh ones,’ Zilla declared one day when they were sitting on the verandah at ‘Charmaine’.

  Missie knew where this was leading. She didn’t answer.

  ‘What we need’s someone who plays cards a lot,’ Zill said as if she hadn’t seen, with her own eyes, all the cards that Aunt Belle had for her bridge group.

  ‘We’re not allowed,’ Missie said. Those cards were out of the question.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because I already thought of it and we can’t have any.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘I didn’t even ask.’ There’d be no point. Her mother would say no, they belonged to Aunt Belle. And there was no way Aunt Belle was going to cough up. ‘They use them for games. They don’t just take them to play swaps with.’

  ‘You could have the jokers. Nobody uses them for anything,’ Zilla said. ‘They’ll never even miss them.’

  It all made sense on the verandah. Even as they said goodbye it was still an easy thing to consider.

  ‘Just wait until your mum’s busy doing something else. They always say yes then.’

  ‘Don’t suppose there’s any old cards that nobody wants?’ She had curved herself around the end of the kitchen table to see how far she could reach without falling. Her mother was preoccupied with dinner.

  ‘What sort of cards?’

  ‘Swap cards ... you know, like the ones I have for school.’

  ‘What would I be doing with swap cards? God love us, Missie, what’s got into you – and stop swinging around the table like that. You’ll knock something over.’

  Missie straightened up. ‘They don’t have to be proper swap cards. They could be from a deck of cards...’

  ‘And where would I get a deck of cards at seven o’clock at night? Just tell me that!’

  ‘Aunt Belle’s got stacks.’ Missie had gone on and was pleased with the way she sounded a little like Zilla. ‘I seen ’em.’

  ‘You saw them...’

  ‘They’re in the drawer ... and I only want a couple.’

  ‘They belong to Aunt Belle. And they’re playing cards. And before you say it again, no you can’t have any.’ She’d jostled around Missie with the casserole, nudging the oven door shut with her foot. ‘Out of the way, Miss! Scoot!’

  Missie had scooted.

  But she’d dallied along the sideboard that stood in the hallway against the back wall. This was where the playing cards lived. In the drawer on the right-hand side.

  They were beautiful. Lovely cards with hunting scenes and horses leaping over fences and men in red jackets with foxes in the foreground. She hadn’t been too thrilled when her mother told her what was going to happen to the fox but the cards were beautiful just the same.

  From the kitchen further along the hall, she could hear the clatter of dishes and Twilight Ranger rattling away on the wireless.

  Behind her the front door was shut against the night air and the front light burned chilly patterns into the leadlight window. It would be easy to hear footsteps coming up the path – it was gravel and made a crunch-crunch-crunch no matter how hard you tried to be silent.

  Aunt Belle always wore shoes with hard high heels, so you could hear her coming from a long way off.

  And Max was nowhere to be seen.

  But it sure as hell felt like something was watching her. Her heart was beating so hard it was making her stomach cramp up and her eyes were standing out like they do in comics.
>
  Too late now.

  Both hands firmly, gently, drew the drawer along its runners. One, two, three, four, five stacks of three, finger-smoothed glossy decks of cards.

  She took two. Only two and had the drawer shut and the cards tucked away under her cardie so quick it was a surprise to find it done.

  There was no time to check around. It was too late to feel bad. She’d think about that when she got up into her room and it would only take a minute anyway to find the jokers.

  They didn’t count. According to Zill, and she knew most things.

  ‘Missie!’ Her mother’s voice came from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Missie! Find me a fresh apron from the top drawer, please.’

  God, her heart stopped, frozen in her chest. She could have died right then. And would have only her mother was on the way. There’d be hell to pay if she got caught and Aunt Belle would be none too happy either.

  Quickly, quietly, on tip-tiptoe she took off along the corridor. She wasn’t supposed to be here either but it was only a little way around the corner. It wasn’t even close to the guests’ rooms. Not that they were ever about anyway.

  She heard her mother call once more and then the exasperated sigh that said there was going to be trouble later on.

  She settled down on the floor beside the day bed in the corridor, a little beyond the jardinière that held long-stemmed flowers that weren’t real. There was light coming in through the French doors. It was enough, if she bent forward and held the cards at an angle, to see which ones were the jokers.

  And to see the farm scenes on the front.

  And the old draught horses. And one that looked like a fat man laughing.

  Perfect.

  Oleksander sat quietly. Since the death of the child he had taken to staying away from the women in this house. As ‘Charmaine’ was owned by a widow and the house run by another widow, it wasn’t easy to avoid them. His neighbour, the only other resident in the house at the moment, was a difficult man who worked with the fishing fleet from the Lakes. His work took him away for many days at a time and when he came home it was sleep he craved and did so with great energy. His snores rippled through the thin dividing walls and Oleksander had moved his bed across the room and shifted the dresser into its place in the hope it would act as a buffer. To a degree it was successful but John Fellows’s occasional snort was still heard, reminding Oleksander of his father.

  ‘What is that noise?’ Chaim had risen onto his elbow and turned his head slightly.

  ‘It is my father.’

  We had covered our mouths so our laughing would not be heard. It was afternoon. Daytime and we should not be here, huddled against the wall, outside my parents’ room. My father had come home from his work and his mood was good. My mother had sent us out to play.

  ‘For a little while,’ she’d said. ‘Do not go far.’

  She had given us bread. It was good to have bread when we did not have to ask. Food was given if we were seated at the table. It was precious, it was what we knew. We did not waste a crumb. Not one. Nor did we go far.

  We sat under the window and heard first my mother’s soft laugh. And then my father.

  ‘He snores like a big pig!’ Chaim was laughing too loud now and ran away before he would be caught.

  But it was not snoring I listened to. I did not know what it was but there was contentment in my home that day.

  They should still be together. His mother and his father. Even Chaim and his family were gone. His mother would keep him, she’d said, until he found the right girl to give her the grandchildren. ‘Then you build your own house. It is enough,’ she’d teased him, ‘that your father keeps me awake with his snores as loud as a saw cutting down a forest without all these new grandchildren filling my rooms with more noise.’

  All those new grandchildren waiting to be born...

  The wind stirred beyond the house and a tree scattered shadows across the wall. There was one light on the street corner, a sentinel guarding nothing worth keeping in this new country.

  New Australian, that’s what he was called. He was the only one with a name that was strange. His days were spent surrounded by flat sounding names that didn’t suggest history or family. His own name, Oleksander, the name chosen for him by his father because it was his father’s name and his father before him and now, in this place where they knew nothing about him, they had changed it.

  ‘Too bloody hard, digger,’ one of the farm packers had said. ‘How about we call you Al, eh? Big Al. Suits ya better.’

  It was like they had done him a favour. Taking away his name as if it was of no consequence.

  There was so much to understand. So much not to be angry about and it was so easy to be angry about all of it.

  Soon the sounds of the kitchen would cease and there would be dinner served. And it would be lamb. Or stew and potatoes. It was all they knew, these Australians. Lamb and stew and ignorant kindness. The women downstairs. They were kind. Marcie with the little girl offered him too much food as if this was the only thing that he understood. Her pies, though, had a crust that was so tough he had taken to slipping it in his pocket to feed to the birds on the way to the sheds each morning.

  ‘You must eat more,’ she said when he’d first arrived from Bogabilla where the food was grey and swam in lumpy fluid. ‘There’ll be no stopping you then.’

  She was not much older than he. Perhaps twenty-nine. Perhaps not. Whichever way it went, she was too young to be talking to him like he was a baby.

  ‘Sank you,’ he’d said, and saw the little girl, Missie, look away to hide her grin at his accent. ‘I am now twenty years, old enough to stop.’

  It had surprised her.

  ‘You look younger,’ she said, keeping her eyes on the bowl in front of her. ‘And you get the silly grin off your face, Miss, and help Mr Shev ... Mr Shev...’

  ‘Shevchenko,’ he’d said. He thought about breaking it into small, bite-size Australian lumps but didn’t bother. So little she knew of him. He was a boy to her, a child. He would like to have told her that he was old enough to be a man and to do things men do. Sometimes boys had to become men too quickly.

  ‘You are safe now,’ he’d said. And put his arms around her as he’d seen his father do in an ancient time when his mother needed comfort.

  ‘I don’t know where I’m going,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t know how to leave.’

  There was no question that she would not leave, but he knew the pain of tearing up roots from their home soil.

  ‘There is no home any more,’ he’d said and continued to hold her, as weightless as an empty shell. Fragile now that her spirit had finally been broken. He didn’t even know her but her story was written in the way she looked at him. A lost boy. A husband. A home.

  ‘You will find a new place.’ Brave words filled him with fear. What new place could be found? He was homesick for the place that could no longer be his. If he went back, the square would still be there and the place where his father fell would not be stained. Other stains had flooded across it now.

  His father who’d crossed the square that he’d crossed a thousand times before and handed a neighbour some bread.

  They’d shot him and left him there.

  ‘Come away,’ he’d said to the unknown woman in his arms and turned his eyes from that distant past. ‘We are free to go now.’

  He held her as she sank against him and he wondered at the cost of freedom.

  She’d clung to him in the darkness of the hallway of that camp where they’d been posted. Her face buried in his neck and she held him, half-child, half-man, holding the ones she’d traded.

  For a short time she was with them. And he was a man and with her doing what good men do...

  Or what he thought a good man should do. It was, after all, what he imagined his father would have done.

  So many tears. So many dead children.

  So here he sat, in the dark, watching the glow of his cigarette and feeling the warmth f
rom its tip as he cupped it in his hands.

  The women in this house had soothed their grief and made thanks that their children were still at their sides. He’d avoided them, not sure if it was because their grief still sat too closely beneath the surface. Or the fact that they were thankful for having been spared and their smugness was at odds with their sorrow.

  The shadows on the wall danced again as winter pressed closer. He thought of the patterns of branches moving and the patterns in the hair of the girl in the laundry door.

  She had not been back since that day.

  He turned slightly, his attention pulled from the patterns and his thoughts of a girl who had moments that reminded him of Anichka.

  He saw her then. The child from downstairs.

  She’d crept around the corner behind him and was seated on the floor. It would be very cold and very hard on the wooden floor and he leaned out a little to see what held her attention so completely.

  Cards. It was some cards that she held and he remembered children’s games in the camps along the way.

  ‘What is sssat you are doing?’ he said quietly.

  The child jumped. He hadn’t meant to frighten her but the cards spewed across the floor and she was looking up at him, her fear undisguised even in this shadow.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She was trying to hide the cards and was not, he was sure now, supposed to have them. He bent down trying to think of a way to remove the panic of being caught. Here was something he knew too well and something he would not consciously ignore.

  ‘These are very beautiful, these cards.’ He held one up so the Laughing Cavalier was visible. ‘It is a very famous painting, this one. Tell me again you name, please?’

  ‘Missie.’

  ‘Ah, Missie. I remember now. This famous one. You know this?’

  Missie shook her head.

  ‘You must take care, Missie, not to crease this ones. To play with they will be, how you say...’ He shrugged. So many words were still a mystery. ‘Not good.’

  ‘Ruined,’ Missie said softly.